A futurist sees signs everywhere, but anyone can connect the dots and glimpse what may come.

When I signed up for my first cell phone in the late 90s (a Motorola StarTAC), I didn’t need Faith Popcorn, Ray Kurzweil, or Alvin Toffler to tell me the smartphone would become a must-have consumer- and work-device.

I remember traipsing up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue right after buying my StarTAC one day and every block seeing people walking and talking on a mobile phone. That was 1998. Multiply that by millions and you get today’s constant connectivity, and this has led to an important change in consumer behavior. Suddenly joining house keys and wallet in your pocket or purse was a phone, and over the years greater capability was layered into its hardware – phone, email, texting, map/GPS, games, ebooks, photos and video, and, of course, thousands of apps.

As time passes we expect consumer goods, especially electronics, to get smaller, faster, and more powerful. Nowadays, however, much of the emphasis is on making technologies more efficient. It’s using masses of human beings as heat sources for buildings and perhaps one day capturing the kinetic energy created by cars, trucks, bicycles and pedestrians to power whole sections of cities.

It is, in essence, solving our energy crisis one human at a time. And this economizing approach ­­­­­­­­­­­– to produce more from less – could have a tremendous impact on future products and brands. That’s because anything that achieves motion creates energy. IBM Distinguished Engineer Harry Kolar predicts that in the coming years, “advances in renewable energy technology could make it possible for us to draw on power generated by everything from our running shoes to the ocean’s waves.”

Naturally, enslaving humans to function as energy sources recalls the movie “The Matrix,” where machines converted humans into batteries to fuel their repressive robotic civilization. While Sci-fi fantasy, it is based on scientific principles. The average person tosses off 100 watts of excess heat just by standing around and stores as much energy in fat as a one-ton battery. Architects in Paris have taken this ambient energy, added to it heat produced from the friction of metal wheels on metal tracks generated in Paris’s Rambuteau Metro station and supply heat to 17 apartments in a nearby public housing project. This approach has also been tested in Stockholm, Sweden, in the Central Station, where a quarter-of-a-million travelers pool their ambient warmth to heat a 13-story office building nearby. And in inside the gargantuan Mall of America in Minneapolis, which is heated from human activity, sunlight streaming through windows, and light fixtures, it might be subfreezing outside but a downright balmy 70 inside.

Six billion people on the planet and we’re the ones using all of this energy. The more we skim from our fellow humans, the less we’ll waste producing it, and in recent years there have been several inventions to help usher in this new energy-independence era. Shoes in development can collect energy from a tiny generator inserted into the soles and a wearable vest can power medical sensors to check high blood pressure and other symptoms that could be dispatched wirelessly back to a doctor or hospital.

Human organs could help power devices like a pumping heart driving a pacemaker or knee brackets replacing a soldier’s battery packs by harvesting energy from his movement. One gym in Portland, Oregon, boasts elliptical machines and stationery bikes that convert leg churning into electricity to help power the building. Dance clubs are powering LED-light shows by harvesting power generated by hundreds of dancers. Princeton University engineers developed a small wearable chip that can capture the energy created by our natural movements to juice small gadgets like a smartphone and other device. (Bonus: each person turns into a giant Mophie!)

Meanwhile, in Durham, England, a crematorium announced it would take the waste heat from the burning of corpses and sell the energy to a local power utility. Each incinerated body creates 150 kilowatt-hours, which is “enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour.” And on a grander scale, sidewalk panels to stash the kinetic energy of thousands of pedestrians could power streetlights while speed bumps in fast food parking lots could “capture kinetic energy from vehicles that would otherwise be lost when drivers hit the brakes to pick up their Whoppers.”

Imagine if you could secrete panels like these under roads and sidewalks in places like New York City. You might not be able to power Times Square, but you could generate electricity from activities that once wasted it – and go a long way to help forge a more energy-efficient society.

Adam is a journalism professor at New York University, and has written for The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, the Economist, as well as many others. He is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed “Viral Loop.” His latest is “Play at Work: How Games Inspire Breakthrough Thinking,” which is coming out in paperback next year. Follow him on Twitter @penenberg or visit his website, penenberg.com.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]

Google’s product head, Sundar Pichai, said during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that the company’s wireless network will debut in the United States in the “coming months.” Asked about the network’s features, Pichai said that it wants to “experiment” like it has with Android, and that it has carrier partners with which it’s working. [Source: TechCrunch]